[ Psalm 12:6 ]

Category Archives: foreknowledge

No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.
John 6:44

The wisdom of man says that unless our love for God proceeds from our own initial willingness to worship Him, then it is not truly love, but a robotic and forced relationship.

The problem with this assertion is that no man in himself is actually willing to love the true God until God opens the man’s eyes to His goodness in the first place. The will is only free to love that which is according to it’s nature; and the fallen nature is at its core a rejection of and a blindness to God’s goodness. To despise this fact is to despise the riches of God’s mercy.

“Seek and you shall find” was Christ’s admonition to those who are already His own disciples, and it was regarding prayer.“There is not one who seeks after God” is the apostle’s precise description of fallen humanity without Christ.

“We love because He first loved us.”
– This means that unless He first freely loved me so as to open my eyes, I could never have freely loved Him. I may have sought my own earthly conception of Him; but that is not why He decided to have mercy upon me. He chose to show mercy before the foundation of the world for the glory of His own Name; and I dare not be so arrogant as to suggest that He simply foresaw that I was somehow more spiritually sensitive than others. I was in fact spiritually dead; that is what He foresaw. But His foreknowledge is a powerful personal knowing of the sinner which redeems them; this is what it means that He foreknew me.

It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me…
John 6:45

Pleading with men’s free will and intellectual desires does not win them to Christ; it rather wins them to a god who must always bow to their demands of mercy, as though it were an “inalienable right.” It brings them to worship a spiritually libertarian god of “fairness” who is obligated to give all sinners a “chance;” rather than the holy God of justice who was not lawfully required to save even a portion of such self-entitled, demonic wretches, yet who did.

The great conumdrum of the gospel is not how God can be fair if He chooses not to redeem every soul; it is rather how He can remain uncompromisingly just if He redeems any.

As the scripture says:

He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord.
Proverbs 17:15

Therefore, the only Just One condemned Himself willingly under the wrath of God, that He might justify many wicked.

That is not fair.
But it was made to be just.
And those whose hearts He hardens, He hardens justly; for there is no one who of themselves seeks after God.

Let no man answer back to God, in any matter. Let them only come to Him, if by His gracious will they will come.

At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to Me by My Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
Matthew 11:25-30

(I beat this dead horse not because in doing so I think I will raise it; but in obedience to He who raises the dead.)

Perhaps the greatest lie in evangelical Christianity today is that if you “ask Jesus into your heart,” He will most definitely come in.
– Paul Washer

You have not chosen Me, but I chose you out and planted you, that you should go and should bear fruit, and your fruit remain, that whatever you should ask the Father in My name, He may give you.
John 15:16

And I made known to them Your name, and will make it known, that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.
John 17:26 (LITV)

Here the Son prays to the Father not concerning the world, but concerning those whom the Father has given Him out of the world (Jn 17:9-10); and He speaks here of a very particular love: “the love with which You have loved Me.” This is not the same love by which God “so loved the world”(Jn 3:16) For it is not the world, but whoever believes in Him out of the world that has eternal Life; and that Life is in the Son, and that Life is to know the Father who loves the Son: it is the very Life which the Godhead has within itself, “the love with which You have loved Me.”

For we, who by necessity possess different kinds of affections or loves toward different things, ought not to marvel if God, after whose image we were created, has a holy range of affections infinitely beyond the wisdom of our own. We dare not be so arrogant as to postulate that just because “God so loved the world,” He cannot still be “angry with the wicked every day,” or “hate all the workers of iniquity,” or “abhor the bloody and deceitful man.” (Ps 5:5-6, 7:11, 10:3) Truly, it is because God is love that He must absolutely hate; and not only the sin, but the sinner also. He is jealous for the glory of His own great Name, and the sins of men who were made in His image are defamatory to that Name.

The purest love necessitates the purest hatred. A man with a heart after God’s own heart was able to say of the Lord’s enemies, “I hate them with a perfect hatred…”(Ps 139:22) The man who loves one thing and does not hate the other is lying to himself; and God is not such a one. For He loves all that is good, right, perfect, and holy; and the higher these are, the more in His love are they evidenced to abide. Therefore He must hate all that is wicked, perverse, corrupt, and unholy; and the lower these are, the more under His wrath are they evidenced to abide.

Who then are we to judge that God should not have a general affection for the whole creation, yet also reserve a specific and salvific love for only a portion? The God of all the earth will do right; and in so doing He separates His righteous ones from the wicked before the latter are destroyed (Gen 18). And the righteous are so because He has mercifully made them vessels of honor, and of covenant love. He had the right to hate all men, yet He has chosen to lavish such love upon a people: the very love with which the Father loves the Son.

Truly then, God overlooking the times of ignorance, now strictly commands all men everywhere to repent, because He set a day in which He is going to judge the habitable world in righteousness, by a Man whom He appointed; having given proof to all by raising Him from the dead.
Acts 17:30-31

The gospel is proclaimed as much for judgement as it is for salvation. It is the seed of the Sower which reveals the existing nature of the ground upon which it falls. We have not paid careful attention to what Jesus said immediately after explaining the parable of the sower…

But no one lighting a lamp covers it with a vessel, or puts it underneath a couch, but sets it on a lampstand, that those coming in may see the light. For nothing is hidden which will not be revealed, nor secret which will not be known and come to be revealed. Then observe how you hear; for whoever has, it will be given to him; and whoever does not have, even what he seems to have will be taken from him.
Luke 8:16-18

The same Word of God which He first described as a seed, He now describes as a light that reveals the true substance of whatever it touches. Those “coming in” to the kingdom see the light of this gospel, and they come in because they are drawn of the Father (Jn 6:44). But the rest do not see its true light, even though it shines upon them, and even though some of them might walk amidst the children of light. Likewise, the seed of the Sower commands all; but not all have ears to hear, for to them it has not been given, and these (being many) are judged according to it.

And he said to him, “If they will not hear Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if one from the dead should rise.”
Luke 16:31

We like to suppose that the ground can be changed by the seed, if only the ground does the right thing with the seed. But in truth, the ground will be judged according to what the seed does with the ground, and it does not abide bad ground. (For nothing is hidden which will not be revealed.) We also miss the purpose of the warnings given to every ear, such as, “be careful how you hear,” or the reason for exhortations to seek God with all of the heart. For the warnings against falling away and the exhortations to seek the Lord are all serving to suggest that hard ground can deceive itself into thinking that it is good soil. For “whoever does not have, even what he SEEMS to have will be taken from him.” Time will tell the truth of mens’ hearts, and the Day will bring all to light.

Examine yourselves, whether you are in the faith, prove yourselves. Or do you not yourselves perceive that Jesus Christ is in you, unless you are reprobates? And I hope you will know that we are not reprobates.
2 Corinthians 13:5-6

For who determines the nature of the soils? If it were up to the choice of man, then no soil would ever become good. For in Adam, “there is not one doing good, there is not one seeking after God.” But it takes a hearing ear to seek after God; and it is His alone to give to whomever He wills.

Therefore,

Everyone believing(Grk: present & ongoing faith: used consistently by John to describe authentic fruitful faith, not a whimsical belief, nor even potential faith)that Jesus is the Christ, HAS been generated from God…
1 John 5:1

Faith that endures to the end is the result of true regeneration, not the other way around.

So then, to whom He desires, He shows mercy. And to whom He desires, He hardens. You will then say to me, “Why does He yet find fault? For who has resisted His will?”But rather, O man, who are you answering against God? Shall the thing formed say to the One forming it, “Why did You make me like this?” Or does not the potter have authority over the clay, out of the one lump to make one vessel to honor, and one to dishonor? What if God, desiring to show forth wrath, and to make His power known, endured in much long-suffering vessels of wrath having been fitted out for destruction, so that He make known the riches of His glory on vessels of mercy which He before pepared for glory?
Romans 9:18-23

God deals justly with all, and to some of them He gives mercy by dealing justly with their sin in the death of Christ. For this very reason we proclaim with great confidence the command of the Gospel: because He has a particular people whom He is calling each by name; and His command will bring them in, while at the same time it will judge the ones who do not obey, as is their nature.

For He came to gather the lost sheep of His own house; but unto the rest He says, “You will not believe, because you are not of my sheep.” His sheep hear His voice, He knows them, and they follow Him; but to the self-deceivers He says again, “I never knew you.” They are judged righteously according to the willful rebellion of their hearts; because self-will is the only will of those not generated from God, and they love their own will.

Where the will of men is implicitpy given the throne by its being pleaded with rather than its being commanded, then the gospel being preached is no longer the power of God – not that there is another gospel.

There is a great hatred in the body of Christ today for this truth of God’s sovereignty, just as it has always been drifted away from shortly after its light was revived. I have at times questioned it in these matters, but have very recently been graciously dragged back to it by the Lord. He made this matter clear at first, and I resisted it for a time; but now the clarity of His Word regarding these things is stunning, and I can take no credit for it. Truly His gospel is the command which tries the hearts! If I ever had anything to do with God’s mercy being bestowed upon me, then He is no God.